Friday, May 12, 2017

Scorpion 3x24 Review: “Maroon 8” (These Are the Nerds You Can Bet On) [Guest Poster: Yasmine]


“Maroon 8”
Original Airdate: May 8, 2017

I just want to start by saying that this episode gave me so many Lost flashbacks. It was like watching Lost if Lost had been more quirky and fun than dramatic and heartbreaking. It had everything from the crashed plane, to people keeping secrets from each other, to the impromptu island surgery and the mysterious hatch in the jungle. But it was all done Scorpion style. It was fun and funny, exciting and fast-paced and containing enough makeshift science to keep the geniuses on their game.

The episode picks up where the last one ended, with the team on the plane and Happy and the pilot, Scotty, losing control of the plane. They do manage to locate an island off in the distance and brace themselves for a crash landing.

Luckily, the team wakes up with minimal injuries sustained — all except for the pilot. Having been the only on in the cockpit which disconnected from the rest of the plane upon impact, the team find Scotty with his arm pinned down. It looks like an easily fixable situation at first, until Toby assesses and determines that it is far more dangerous than they thought. If they unpin the pilot, poison will flood his system and he will be dead almost immediately; if they don’t, he will also die, but only a little later. They have no option but to perform an on-island, all-organic surgery. The team splits up to gather and prepare what they need from around the island and this gives them a chance to talk, bond, and find out new, interesting things about each other.

A lot of the geniuses are not acting themselves, the first of whom is Sly. The math genius we know would be freaking out in a situation like this. But for some reason, Sylvester is not freaking out. Instead, he takes on the fatalist mentality, calculating their rate of demise at every chance he gets. And even after finding a bunker in the jungle — which they surmise is an old Japanese station from WWII — Sly’s morale still remains down.

They find maps in the bunker that show them they are miles off course and no one would be looking for them — another Lost flashback here — and also discover an old radio that they manage to fix, using it to find out that a Japanese ship would be passing by soon. This discovery gives the team another task, besides saving the pilot, and that is signaling for the ship to rescue them.

Sylvester is not the only one acting strange. Young Ralph is as well. The usually very polite Ralph is disrespectful to Cabe while the two are in charge of the fire and sterilizing the makeshift surgical tools. When Cabe asks Ralph about his uncharacteristically rude attitude, the boy admits that he knows about Walter and Paige’s new relationship and that he is worried it won’t survive the island if they don’t get rescued soon.

And Ralph may not be wrong with his assessment. Being in love for the first time in his life, Walter literally has no idea how to behave himself. Sylvester aptly calls him a putz in how he is behaving. The two men, along with Paige, are off into the jungle to find the fruits necessary for the island surgery, and Walter’s behavior is uncomfortably un-Walter. Instead of his usual facts-loving genius self, Walter is walking around like a love-struck fool. In the middle of his crisis, Walter is picking flowers for Paige and calling her the most ridiculous pet names.

Sylvester is the first to call him on his behavior and Paige is quick to do the same. Walter promises to change his behavior, but after watching Toby and Happy during the day, Paige eventually changes her mind. Because there was a big lesson to be learned from the newlywed couple.

Having tied the knot just a few hours ago, Toby and Happy were looking forward to a beachside honeymoon, but instead found themselves marooned. With the stress of being on a stranded island, trying to rescue the pilot, and getting signal a ship to rescue them, things get a little bit more personal than they’d expected — and not in the way they want. In the middle of all this, Happy starts accidentally revealing things about her past that she had never confessed before, and Toby soon realizes he does not really know the woman he just married.

Apparently, Happy lived in Portugal for a while, recorded a pop single, and dated Jake Gyllenhaal. And when Toby reaches his limit with all these secrets, Happy puts his worries to rest. Once again, Happy proves that she may be the least open person in the group, but when she needs to, she knows just what to say. She tells Toby that even though she has never told him that stuff about her past, she would never change anything about it because it led her to him, and of all the things that she had been in her life, being his wife is her favorite.

The team manages to save Scotty’s life, but unfortunately fail to signal the ship, and the episode ends with a three-week jump and the team still marooned on the island, setting up the season finale.

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